Kale is likely not the first choice of elementary school students when deciding what to eat for lunch, but bake it at a low temperature with some oil and salt, and suddenly you’ve got a crispy chip, and a kid-friendly snack. That’s one of many lessons Alden Cadwell has learned since he became the director of food services for Brookline schools about a year ago.

Ignacio Laguarda/ilaguarda@wickedlocal.com

Kale is likely not the first choice of elementary school students when deciding what to eat for lunch, but bake it at a low temperature with some oil and salt, and suddenly you’ve got a crispy chip, and a kid-friendly snack.

That’s one of many lessons Alden Cadwell has learned since he became the director of food services for Brookline schools about a year ago.

Another lesson: Eggplant is a hard sell to children.

Back when he was working in Concord, Cadwell developed an inexpensive recipe for a fried eggplant stick. He dipped the sticks in marinara sauce and thought it was tasty.

“I thought I had a homerun,” he said.

But when he finally tested the food on the students, he realized they didn’t share his take.

“They did not go over well at all,” he said. “It’s very hard to predict what kids are going to like to eat.”

These sorts of trial-and-error experiments are commonplace for Cadwell, who has worked on improving school lunches, both in terms of health and locally sourced ingredients, for years.

Most famously, he worked on the popular television show “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” which started with the British-born Oliver visiting Huntington, W.V., and trying to get the school system there to adapt to a new way of cooking and providing food to students.

Cadwell worked behind the scenes with the lunch ladies in the school district to change some very deeply engrained habits, which mostly involved the use of packaged and processed foods in order to cut costs.

He helped develop recipes for the cooks and helped train them. He was in Huntington for nine months, and a local hospital paid for him to train the lunch ladies.

“We got rid of the chicken patties and the nuggets, and got just whole chicken and would roast it,” he said. “We’ve done that here in Brookline.”

A shrinking epidemic?

The goal of the television show, as well as Cadwell’s work, is to address the obesity epidemic in America, where 12.5 million children are considered clinically obese. The Centers for Disease Control defines obesity in children as a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex. Kids with a BMI between the 85th and 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex or considered overweight.

Earlier this month, the battle against obesity scored a rare victory, when the CDC revealed that the childhood obesity rate decreased in 19 states, including Massachusetts, after decades of rising numbers.

It’s too early to know if those numbers will be reflected in Brookline, and Health Department Director Alan Balsam doesn’t expect a major change, because Brookline already performs much better than other Massachusetts communities.

“I’m very heartened by the fact that the rates are going down nationally, and I hope that’s true in Boston and other communities as well, but I’m just not sure it’s true here,” he said. “Our rates were quite low to begin with, but we’d have to look at this year’s data to see if there’s a slight drop.”

The national obesity epidemic may not be as evident in Brookline, where the percentages of overweight and obese residents are well below the national and state averages.

Balsam said about 26 percent of children in Brookline are overweight or obese, according to a 2011 study. In comparison, the state’s rate is 34 percent.

Last year, the town published “Healthy Brookline,” a study that was the result of a youth behavior survey conducted in Brookline schools.

As part of that study, students were asked how they describe themselves in terms of their weight, and among Brookline High School students, 20 percent described themselves as slightly or very overweight.

The same question was asked on the statewide survey, and 29 percent described themselves as slightly or very overweight, while the figure was 28 percent nationally.

A study by the state’s Community Health Network Area found that approximately 21 percent of 10th graders in Brookline were obese or overweight in 2012, compared to 32 percent for the entire state. The numbers for first graders were practically the same.

“Brookline is doing pretty well,” said Balsam. “There’s an emphasis on walking and biking here that might not exist in other communities. In addition, if you think about it, this is a community that has an outstanding network of parks and open space and I think that contributes to it.”

He added that the recreation programs are one of the best in the state.

“I’d like to think that some of our work in the schools and in the community that we’re doing as a municipality is having some effect, the focus that we have on nutrition and physical activity,” he said.

Cadwell is right in the middle of the nutritional battle.

Fresh and local

Some items on his menu probably wouldn’t qualify as health food to most, but Cadwell tries to make everything in-house, cutting out processed foods and keeping the ingredients fresh and as local as possible, which can be a challenge in the cold months of February and March.

The tater tots he makes from scratch have been very popular as well, and consist entirely of potatoes from Allandale Farm, butter and cheese. A video of Cadwell making the popular tots can be easily found online.

At Pierce School, Cadwell said the school district opened a salad bar that was very successful, and will likely be implemented at other schools. In the spring, all of the greens at the salad bar came from Allandale Farm, and the bar served 180 students a day.

“There is a desire for just better food and the consumption of kale and greens,” he said.

Although some students may be more inclined to try certain foods, and may even like eating their greens, many others prefer to avoid them. Getting the students to eat the healthy options is one of the biggest challenges, said Cadwell, a Roslindale resident.

“We try to spend money wisely in terms of the ingredients we’re getting locally, like potatoes and kale, the two cheapest things we can get from Allandale,” he said.

When he took the job in Brookline, he also started the relationship with Allandale, a first for the school district.

“It’s a no-brainer of a partnership,” he said. “The stuff we choose to get and can get in big quantities from them has been fantastic and reasonably priced.”

Nonetheless, he said the starting point in Brookline was much different from the one in Huntington, one of the most overweight cities in America.

Even though his food program has been successful, Cadwell said he still needs to convince more parents to buy into the program, since many choose not to, which is creating an extra burden on the food service.

“The more we are utilized as a lunch program, the more money we have coming in, and the better ingredients we can buy,” he said.

He’s currently trying to figure out a way to put fish on the table (though not in the form of fish sticks), but the challenge is that he’s only allowed to spend about $1.50 per plate.

Brookline schools charge $3 for lunch for students at the K-8 level and $3.25 for high school students. Because food service is self-funded, Cadwell can only get so creative, depending on how much money is rolling in.

“I personally am interested in making this work in Brookline,” he said.

Balsam said the school system is looking at bringing healthy cooking classes into elementary schools for World Food Day on Oct. 16.

“The schools have done a tremendous job getting junk food out of schools,” he said. “That helps. But also, improving the quality of meals served there, using fresh ingredients, cooking from scratch, using local sourced foods, all of these things contribute to it.”

For Cadwell, the news that childhood obesity is declining in certain states was welcome news, but it doesn’t signal the end of the battle. Not even close.

“That’s very positive and I think we should take a brief moment to pat ourselves on the back and go right back into the trenches because we still have a long ways to go,” he said.

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